Politics

At the risk of weekly over exposure to the blog Firedoglake, I really feel that this post, Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist Call For Rahm Emanuel's Resignation, deserves special attention. I can think of few people in the blogosphere or elsewhere who are more liberal than Jane Hamsher. On the other hand, Grover Norquist has been the leader of "movement conservativism" for more than 2 decades. So, anything that they might do jointly deserves a second look.

ON MAY 19th Californians will go to the polls to vote on six ballot measures that are as important as they are confusing. If these measures fail, America’s biggest state will enter a full-blown financial crisis that will require excruciating cuts in public services. If the measures succeed, the crisis will be only a little less acute. Recent polls suggest that voters are planning to vote most of them down.

This is pretty wild. I was looking over Google news and this popped up in the Financial Times:

Mark Penn:

It’s 3am and your children are asleep, and the markets are collapsing in Shanghai, and in the White House a phone is ringing. Who do you want to answer it? With the collapse of the credit markets, the gyrations in energy prices and the surge in unemployment, this is becoming the central test facing America’s presidential contenders.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama began as an obvious candidate to answer the phone the way Bill Clinton was in America and Tony Blair was in the UK. Neither vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden or Sarah Palin, is an obvious back-up to answer it either.